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WASHINGTON — Spaceflight Industries announced Feb. 11 it will sell its smallsat rideshare launch business to a pair of Japanese companies, allowing it to focus on its BlackSky geospatial business.

Spaceflight Industries said that Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Yamasa Co., Ltd. will acquire its rideshare business, known as Spaceflight, Inc., for an undisclosed sum. Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa will own Spaceflight as a 50/50 joint venture. The companies said that they expect the deal to close in the second quarter of this year, after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to examine any national security implications of the sale.

Spaceflight Industries said it will use the proceeds from the deal to accelerate the growth of BlackSky, its geospatial intelligence business that is developing a constellation of high-resolution imaging satellites. BlackSky has four satellites in orbit currently with another eight scheduled for launch this year.

Retail mogul Yusaku Maezawa has launched another competition, offering to invest a total of 10 billion Japanese yen ($91 million) in the businesses of 10 entrepreneurs.

The Japanese billionaire announced on Twitter on Friday that he would look to expand the businesses he picked, with the aim of them listing on a stock exchange, according to a translation.

He shared a link to a website outlining the terms of the competition, which explained that entrepreneurs had to email their business proposals to enter, including details as to how they would spend the funds among other information.

To address the challenge, some startups are making chips focused on specific software tasks. Others are pushing further, finding processing and storage solutions in new materials, including synthetic DNA.

Quantum computing is the best-known of these new methods. Startups as well as tech giants including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and International Business Machines Corp. are developing quantum computers, which harness the properties of quantum physics to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time. The advent of quantum computing has paved the way for other experimental techniques, startup executives say.

The market for new computing technology comes as advancements in traditional chip making are hitting a physical limit under Moore’s Law, the idea that every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles.

Continue reading “Where Computing Is Headed—Beyond Quantum” »

On Friday we wrote about Samsung’s mysterious “artificial human” project Neon, speculating that the company was building realistic human avatars that could be used for entertainment and business purposes, acting as guides, receptionists, and more.

Now, a tweet from the project’s lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this — although they don’t give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is.

Continue reading “Samsung’s ‘artificial human’ project definitely looks like a digital avatar” »

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It’s a model the company believes makes sense because the right answer for getting regulatory approval and delivering service in the United States or the Philippines or Indonesia will vary, Steckel said. “We’re going to be doing business with partners around the world,” Steckel said. “Our style is not confrontational. We’re using a different model. It’s a big world.”

OneWeb plans to offer its first customer demonstrations by the end of 2020 and provide full commercial global services in 2021.

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring — Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as “Stealth Space Company”) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business model and progress to date in a new feature article with Bloomberg Businessweek, detailing how it plans to use mass production to deliver rockets quickly and cheaply for small satellite orbital delivery. Astra revealed it has raised more than $100 million from investors, including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Airbus Ventures, Canann Partners and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, to name a few, and it has big ambitions in terms of cost and capabilities.

Astra’s rockets are smaller than most existing launch vehicles in operation, designed to delivery up to 450 lbs of cargo to space, but with the specific mandate of doing so quickly and responsively. The company is a finalist (and the only remaining one) on DARPA’s Launch Challenge, the terms of which mandate that the winning company deploy two rockets from two different locations within a few weeks of each other. Astra is still in the running, while its erstwhile competitors have dropped out, with Virgin Orbit having voluntarily withdrawn and Vector Launch having gone out of business.

The DARPA challenge, which includes an award of $12 million for the winner, represents a growing trend in terms of defense customer needs: Fast turnaround and responsive operations for small satellite delivery. In an industry where the process of securing a launch service provider to actually flying a payload has typically taken at least six months in the best-case scenario, there’s a growing need for quicker timelines in the interest of building more redundancy and resilience into defense and reconnaissance space operations through use of networks of small satellites, versus single large geostationary satellites that are expensive to launch and more time-consuming to task.

If the rocket company pulled off a point-to-point transportation business with its Starship rocket, international airline travel could implode.